Growing a Jazzgreat

"My sister, I remember her/Wearing pigtails, running through the sun in our back yard." Miami-born jazz vocalist and composer Carmen Lundy vividly calls up a childhood reminiscence on the title track to her recent recording, Come Home. "The look in her eyes looking up at me/I remember those days of innocence/I remember those days today."

It was an alarming phone call that conjured those images for Lundy, the oldest of seven children; apparently, doctors had found something suspicious in her sister's lungs. The singer's natural inclination was to jet to her sibling's side, but the geographical logistics of touring would not allow it.

"It was physically impossible for me to go to Miami," Lundy, 53, explains by phone from Washington, D.C., where she was participating in educational workshops and concerts for the Jazz Ahead program at Kennedy Center. "I had this sense of 'That's where I'm supposed to be,' the urgency to try to be wherever she is, but I couldn't go. So [writing the song] was like a way for me to deal with what was going on in my mind and my emotions."

Memories came pouring out of Lundy like Polaroids tumbling out of a shoe box when she sat down with friend and collaborator Deborah Ash. Within an hour, she says, they had the lyric. "And she started with the very first words I told her," Lundy relates, " 'my sister.' "

Gospel beginnings with Mom

Family has long exerted a gravitational tug on Lundy - her sister, by the way, is now "totally fine" - even as her lush, cool vocals and determinedly original compositions have taken her all over the world. (And occasionally back home; she'll return to South Florida for a concert Friday at the Miniaci Center in Davie.)

As a little girl, she hungrily devoured the sounds of her mother's gospel group, The Apostolic Singers. An aunt accompanied the singers on piano and Hammond organ; sometimes a blues guitarist would sit in. The group's extended, spirit-infused improvisations had an electrifying effect on listeners, and young Carmen was hooked. Watching the group's rehearsals, she observed how the singers worked out harmonies and how they were transported to "a whole new dimension" when they performed.

Following her mother's example, Lundy joined choral programs in junior high and high school. She says she truly flowered under the tutelage of Miami Killian's chorale director Ann Duncan, whom she calls "the first and most profound influence outside of my family."

Lundy's musical career began at age 13. Her duo, Steph and Tret, was hired to sing at high school proms throughout Miami and even recorded a 45 titled The Price of Silence. However, she credits a fellow student at Miami Killian, pianist David Roitstein, with turning her on to jazz, sharing LPs of artists such as Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis with her.

At the University of Miami, where Lundy was an opera major, it was Roitstein who pulled her into the jazz program; off campus, she began gigging with his bands. On her first job, at Miami's Eden Roc hotel, Lundy recalls hearing a bandmate's cassette of Ella Fitzgerald tearing up How High the Moon from the classic live-in-Berlin recording.

"When I heard that record," she says, "that was it. That's when I knew for sure that's what I was going to do for the rest of my life."

What Miami scene taught her

In her sophomore year at UM, Lundy's younger brother, bassist Curtis Lundy, came to the university, as did saxophonist Bobby Watson. A personal and musical triangle formed that continues to this day. Spurred by Watson and other student player-composers, Lundy became increasingly inspired to pen her own music, gaining the tools with courses in composition and arranging.

"When I began to perform professionally is when it really began to click," she says. "We would come out of the classroom and take those ideas to our gigs. And I think that's where I really began to hone a sense of whatever it was to do jazz singing."

"What impressed everybody at the time," remembers UM classmate and current faculty member Robert "BeBob" Grabowski, "was her being able to sing what most people couldn't even play. All the jazz vocal majors [now] take improvisation for jazz vocal majors. She did it with the instrumentalists. It was just unheard of across the nation. For her to do that vocally was just nuts."

Lundy established herself as part of a Miami jazz scene that included the likes of Phyllis Hyman, Alice Day, Joe Donato and Ira Sullivan. She held down regular engagements at the Village Inn in Coconut Grove and Les Jardins off Le Jeune Road with fellow UM grad Bruce Hornsby.

"That was one of the things about Carmen that was just so wild," says Grabowski, a bassist and WLRN-91.3 FM jazz radio host, who would catch Lundy's act at hip Miami rooms such as Cy's River Gate and The Checkmate. "By day she'd be doing this heavy, heavy academic [stuff], and at night she'd be playing, not really Top 40 by any means, but she was doing like Stevie Wonder tunes along with jazz standards."